My “smart phone” is a Windows Mobile device. I’ve used the Blackberry and the iPhone and they are both wonderful types of handsets. I’d love to get an iPhone for my personal cell phone, but US carriers have not quite figured out GSM yet. Either that or the FCC is blocking the frequency ranges it needs to penetrate things like walls and ceilings.
Consequently, AT&T wireless service in LA is lousy. I know because we use AT&T at work. I drop calls all the time, just sitting at my desk on the 12th floor. Right next to a window. And I’ve had to install a dual-band repeater in the home of one of the owners of the company I work for. Three bars of reception outside his front door, zero signal inside.
You’re wondering why I don’t get an iPhone for work? Yeah, like I’m going to ask my for an iPhone right now. Have you looked at the unemployment rate lately? I’m not that awesome. “No way, sir! I love my TyTN II. Go Windows Mobile!”
The Blackberry seems like a cool tool. At least it did five years ago. We use Exchange at my work and in order to get a modicum of compatibility between Exchange and the Blackberry, we’d have to fork out the quoted $2500 for an enterprise license to Blackberry Enterprise Server. BES is a piece of software that piggybacks on Exchange and lets Blackberriess (Blackberrys?) emulate the inherent capabilities of the Windows Mobile Exchange ActiveSync replication topology.
Even then I’d be missing DirectPush. Microsoft really believes in integrating its products with each other a lot more than it does integrating them with the competition. Unless the competition is licensing software from Microsoft. A very smart business move by the iPhone team.
Over the last two weeks I’ve become painfully aware of a trick that these ponies can do. (Did I mention that my phone sucks in this department?) The trick involves Twitter. If you don’t know what Twitter is, you should close this browser window and go watch TV.
The trick is this: if you want to you can search Twitter to see who is tweeting in a specific geographic radius. This is a very cool, very new, very RELEVANT technology that is the basis for one of the major revolutions set to wash over the web. The only problem is, no one has quite figured out how to make it work really well yet.
The idea is simple.
If I own a pizza shop and I want to increase my business, a good way to do this is to inform passersby that I’m offering a discount on my pizzas right now. I could do this with a sign in my window, or a sandwich guy out front, but what I’d really like to do is send out a mass text message. Not a huge one to everyone who voted for American Idol, but a targeted one to everyone who comes within, oh, say 3000 ft of my shop. How do I do this? Geolocation and location aware cell phones.
Increasingly, cell phones are coming with built-in GPS receivers. This comes in handy if you want to use navigation software from your cell phone. What is really quite revolutionary, though, is the concept of broadcasting your whereabouts at any given time. It’s a huge violation of privacy and individual liberty. But the 3G iPhone has shown us that people are totally oaky with it. How do we know this? All the Twitter users with iPhones.
Anyone can search Twitter by locale. This is not new. When you sign up for your account you are offered a chance to provide your locale. You can make this as specific as your ZIP code or as general as “Milky Way Galaxy.” It’s up to you.
A lot of twitter users don’t realize that with every tweet their Twitter client is broadcasting their location. Unsophisticated clients (SMS, Web, Twitterific, etc) can do this by manually specifying their location in a tweet of L:location. But more sophisticated clients are doing this automatically.
Try it yourself. This link will take you to the Twitter search site. I’ve already plugged in the coordinates for roughly the center of the UCLA campus. I’ve also specified a search radius of 1 kilometer. This will filter the public timeline by location. Check out how many of these are unwitting iPhone tweet geolocations.
These tweets are coming from apps like hahlo, iTweet, and TwitterFon.
So why can’t I have something this cool for my Tilt.
Well, I went through and tested bunch of stuff and funny enough the best app I found was an open source project called PockeTwit.
I’ll have to save the full review for another post, but there are a bunch of dogs out there that do 3/4 of what they should. PockeTwit is the only one worth downloading if you ask me.
And you did, didn’t you?
Kyle Hayes